Self Serving nonsense of course. USA military power and USA influence has never been greater, however ill used. We can even live with that because it the alternative is real hegemony in a more traditional sense.
The miracle of the British empire is that it little used its position to impoverish the locals unlike most of its competitors. That was the result of an expanding fiat money system which provided ample capital to expand the economic base of the colonies. Something similar has happened under the USA.
Again our competitors like the Chinese still think in mercantilism which actually lowers their influence. Of course Trump does enunciate a naive mercantilism, but this is unlikely to survive once negotiation settles in. It just happens to be the best way to get all to the table for a full blown rewrite and general review which by the way is seriously due.
In the meantime, USA military power is actually over the top and easily expanded to a fully militarized war making mode that can put approximately in combination with all its natural allies around 150,000,000, boots on the ground. These boots improve rapidly in quality every day fighting is delayed to an optima around two years in.
Neither China or India could hope to do this and India would likely align with the USA anyway.
As i said, folks, you do not wish to really go there. This is not an empire that is collapsing at all and its current doctrine of continuous war fighting where needed has now been adopted without any further controversy and compares directly to the methods of the British empire. Takes a navy of course but then we know who has that.
Pentagon study declares American empire is ‘collapsing’
Report demands massive expansion of military-industrial complex to maintain global ‘access to resources’
By Nafeez Ahmed
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/pentagon-study-declares-american-empire-is-collapsing-746754cdaebf
In the first of a series, we report on stunning new evidence that the U.S. Department of Defense is waking up to the collapse of American primacy, and the rapid unraveling of the international order created by U.S. power after the Second World War.
But the Pentagon’s emerging vision of what comes next hardly inspires confidence. We breakdown both the insights and cognitive flaws in this vision. In future pieces we will ask the questions: What is really driving the end of the American empire? And based on that more accurate diagnosis of the problem, what is the real solution?
An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the U.S.-backed international order established after World War 2 is “fraying” and may even be “collapsing”, leading the United States to lose its position of “primacy” in world affairs.
The
solution proposed to protect U.S. power in this new “post-primacy”
environment is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more
propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military
expansionism.
The
document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase
of transformation in which U.S. power is in decline, international
order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is
crumbling.
Having
lost its past status of “pre-eminence”, the U.S. now inhabits a
dangerous, unpredictable “post-primacy” world, whose defining feature is
“resistance to authority”.
Danger
comes not just from great power rivals like Russia and China, both
portrayed as rapidly growing threats to American interests, but also
from the increasing risk of “Arab Spring”-style events. These will erupt
not just in the Middle East, but all over the world, potentially
undermining trust in incumbent governments for the foreseeable future.
The
report, based on a year-long intensive research process involving
consultation with key agencies across the Department of Defense and U.S.
Army, calls for the U.S. government to invest in more surveillance,
better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of public opinion,
and a “wider and more flexible” U.S. military.
The
report was published in June by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic
Studies Institute to evaluate the DoD’s approach to risk assessment at
all levels of Pentagon policy planning. The study was supported and
sponsored by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate; the
Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the Office of the Deputy
Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development; and the Army
Study Program Management Office.
Collapse
“While
the United States remains a global political, economic, and military
giant, it no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state
competitors,” the report laments.
“In brief, the status quo that was hatched and nurtured by U.S. strategists after World War II and has for decades been the principal ‘beat’ for DoD is not merely fraying but may, in fact, be collapsing.”
The
study describes the essentially imperial nature of this order as being
underpinned by American dominance, with the U.S. and its allies
literally “dictating” its terms to further their own interests:
“The order and its constituent parts, first emerged from World War II, were transformed to a unipolar system with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and have by-and-large been dominated by the United States and its major Western and Asian allies since. Status quo forces collectively are comfortable with their dominant role in dictating the terms of international security outcomes and resist the emergence of rival centers of power and authority.”
But
this era when the U.S. and its allies could simply get their way is
over. Observing that U.S. officials “naturally feel an obligation to
preserve the U.S. global position within a favorable international
order,” the report concludes that this “rules-based global order that
the United States built and sustained for 7 decades is under enormous
stress.”
The
report provides a detailed breakdown of how the DoD perceives this
order to be rapidly unravelling, with the Pentagon being increasingly
outpaced by world events. Warning that “global events will happen faster
than DoD is currently equipped to handle”, the study concludes that the
U.S. “can no longer count on the unassailable position of dominance,
supremacy, or pre-eminence it enjoyed for the 20-plus years after the
fall of the Soviet Union.”
So
weakened is U.S. power, that it can no longer even “automatically
generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.”
It’s not just U.S. power that is in decline. The U.S. Army War College study concludes that:
“[A]ll states and traditional political authority structures are under increasing pressure from endogenous and exogenous forces… The fracturing of the post-Cold War global system is accompanied by the internal fraying in the political, social, and economic fabric of practically all states.”
But,
the document says, this should not be seen as defeatism, but rather a
“wakeup call”. If nothing is done to adapt to this “post-primacy”
environment, the complexity and speed of world events will “increasingly
defy [DoD’s] current strategy, planning, and risk assessment
conventions and biases.”
Defending the “status quo”
Top
on the list of forces that have knocked the U.S. off its position of
global “pre-eminence”, says the report, are the role of competing
powers — major rivals like Russia and China, as well as smaller players
like Iran and North Korea.
The
document is particularly candid in setting out why the U.S. sees these
countries as threats — not so much because of tangible military or
security issues, but mainly because their pursuit of their own
legitimate national interests is, in itself, seen as undermining
American dominance.
Russia
and China are described as “revisionist forces” who benefit from the
U.S.-dominated international order, but who dare to “seek a new
distribution of power and authority commensurate with their emergence as
legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance.” Russia and China, the analysts
say, “are engaged in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of
U.S. authority, will, reach, influence, and impact.”
The
premise of this conclusion is that the U.S.-backed “status quo”
international order is fundamentally “favorable” for the interests of
the U.S. and its allies. Any effort to make global order also work
“favorably” for anyone else is automatically seen as a threat to U.S.
power and interests.
Thus,
Russia and China “seek to reorder their position in the existing status
quo in ways that — at a minimum — create more favorable circumstances
for pursuit of their core objectives.” At first glance there seems
nothing particularly wrong about this. So the analysts emphasize that “a
more maximalist perspective sees them pursuing advantage at the direct
expense of the United States and its principal Western and Asian
allies.”
Most
conspicuous of all, there is little substantiation in the document of
how Russia and China pose a meaningful threat to American national
security.
The
chief challenge is that they “are bent on revising the contemporary
status quo” through the use of “gray zone” techniques, involving “means
and methods falling far short of unambiguous or open provocation and
conflict”.
Such
“murkier, less obvious forms of state-based aggression”, despite
falling short of actual violence, are condemned — but then, losing any
sense of moral high-ground, the Pentagon study advocates that the U.S.
itself should “go gray or go home” to ensure U.S. influence.
The
document also sets out the real reasons that the U.S. is hostile to
“revolutionary forces” like Iran and North Korea: they pose fundamental
obstacles to U.S. imperial influence in those regions. They are:
“… neither the products of, nor are they satisfied with, the contemporary order… At a minimum, they intend to destroy the reach of the U.S.-led order into what they perceive to be their legitimate sphere of influence. They are also resolved to replace that order locally with a new rule set dictated by them.”
Far
from insisting, as the U.S. government does officially, that Iran and
North Korea pose as nuclear threats, the document instead insists they
are considered problematic for the expansion of the “U.S.-led order.”
Losing the propaganda war
Amidst
the challenge posed by these competing powers, the Pentagon study
emphasizes the threat from non-state forces undermining the “U.S.-led
order” in different ways, primarily through information.
The
“hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information, disinformation,
and disaffection”, the study team observes, is leading to the
uncontrolled spread of information. The upshot is that the Pentagon
faces the “inevitable elimination of secrecy and operational security”.
“Wide uncontrolled access to technology that most now take for granted is rapidly undermining prior advantages of discrete, secret, or covert intentions, actions, or operations… In the end, senior defense leaders should assume that all defense-related activity from minor tactical movements to major military operations would occur completely in the open from this point forward.”
This
information revolution, in turn, is leading to the “generalized
disintegration of traditional authority structures… fueled, and/or
accelerated by hyperconnectivity and the obvious decay and potential
failure of the post-Cold War status quo.”
Civil unrest
Highlighting
the threat posed by groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, the study also
points to “leaderless instability (e.g., Arab Spring)” as a major driver
of “a generalized erosion or dissolution of traditional authority
structures.”
The
document hints that such populist civil unrest is likely to become
prominent in Western homelands, including inside the United States.
“To date, U.S. strategists have been fixated on this trend in the greater Middle East. However, the same forces at work there are similarly eroding the reach and authority of governments worldwide… it would be unwise not to recognize that they will mutate, metastasize, and manifest differently over time.”
The U.S. homeland is flagged-up as being especially vulnerable to the breakdown of “traditional authority structures”:
“The United States and its population are increasingly exposed to substantial harm and an erosion of security from individuals and small groups of motivated actors, leveraging the confluence of hyperconnectivity, fear, and increased vulnerability to sow disorder and uncertainty. This intensely disorienting and dislocating form of resistance to authority arrives via physical, virtual, and psychological violence and can create effects that appear substantially out of proportion to the origin and physical size or scale of the proximate hazard or threat.”
There
is little reflection, however, on the role of the US government itself
in fomenting such endemic distrust, through its own policies.
Bad facts
Among
the most dangerous drivers of this risk of civil unrest and mass
destabilization, the document asserts, are different categories of fact.
Apart from the obvious “fact-free”, defined as information that
undermines “objective truth”, the other categories include actual truths that, however, are damaging to America’s global reputation.
“Fact-inconvenient”
information consists of the exposure of “details that, by implication,
undermine legitimate authority and erode the relationships between
governments and the governed” — facts, for instance, that reveal how
government policy is corrupt, incompetent or undemocratic.
“Fact-perilous”
information refers basically to national security leaks from
whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, “exposing
highly classified, sensitive, or proprietary information that can be
used to accelerate a real loss of tactical, operational, or strategic
advantage.”
“Fact-toxic”
information pertains to actual truths which, the document complains,
are “exposed in the absence of context”, and therefore poison “important
political discourse.” Such information is seen as being most potent in
triggering outbreaks of civil unrest, because it:
“… fatally weakens foundational security at an international, regional, national, or personal level. Indeed, fact-toxic exposures are those likeliest to trigger viral or contagious insecurity across or within borders and between or among peoples.”
In
short, the U.S. Army War College study team believe that the spread of
‘facts’ challenging the legitimacy of American empire is a major driver
of its decline: not the actual behavior of the empire which such facts
point to.
Mass surveillance and psychological warfare
The Pentagon study therefore comes up with two solutions to the information threat.
The
first is to make better use of U.S. mass surveillance capabilities,
which are described as “the largest and most sophisticated and
integrated intelligence complex in world.” The U.S. can “generate
insight faster and more reliably than its competitors can, if it chooses
to do so”. Combined with its “military forward presence and power
projection”, the U.S. is in “an enviable position of strength.”
Supposedly, though, the problem is that the U.S. does not make full use of this potential strength:
“That strength, however, is only as durable as the United States’ willingness to see and employ it to its advantage. To the extent that the United States and its defense enterprise are seen to lead, others will follow…”
The
document also criticizes U.S. strategies for focusing too much on
trying to defend against foreign efforts to penetrate or disrupt U.S.
intelligence, at the expense of “the purposeful exploitation of the same
architecture for the strategic manipulation of perceptions and its
attendant influence on political and security outcomes.”
Pentagon officials need to simply accept, therefore, that:
“… the U.S. homeland, individual American citizens, and U.S. public opinion and perceptions will increasingly become battlefields.”
Military supremacy
Having mourned the loss of U.S. primacy, the Pentagon report sees expanding the U.S. military as the only option.
The
bipartisan consensus on military supremacism, however, is not enough.
The document demands a military force so powerful it can preserve
“maximum freedom of action”, and allow the U.S. to “dictate or hold
significant sway over outcomes in international disputes.”
One would be hard-pressed to find a clearer statement of imperial intent in any U.S. Army document:
“While as a rule, U.S. leaders of both political parties have consistently committed to the maintenance of U.S. military superiority over all potential state rivals, the post-primacy reality demands a wider and more flexible military force that can generate advantage and options across the broadest possible range of military demands. To U.S. political leadership, maintenance of military advantage preserves maximum freedom of action…
Finally, it allows U.S. decision-makers the opportunity to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international disputes in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unacceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.”
Once
again, military power is essentially depicted as a tool for the U.S. to
force, threaten and cajole other countries into submission to U.S.
demands.
The
very concept of ‘defence’ is thus re-framed as the capacity to use
overwhelming military might to get one’s way — anything which undermines
this capacity ends up automatically appearing as a threat that deserves
to be attacked.
Empire of capital
Accordingly,
a core goal of this military expansionism is ensuring that the United
States and its international partners have “unimpeded access to air,
sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order to
underwrite their security and prosperity”.
This also means that the U.S. must retain the ability to physically access any region it wants, whenever it wants:
“Failure of or limitations on the ability of the United States to enter and operate within key regions of the world, for example, undermine both U.S. and partner security.”
The
U.S. thus must try to minimize any “purposeful, malevolent, or
incidental interruption of access to the commons, as well as critical
regions, resources, and markets.”
Without
ever referring directly to ‘capitalism’, the document eliminates any
ambiguity about how the Pentagon sees this new era of “Persistent
Conflict 2.0”:
“… some are fighting globalization and globalization is also actively fighting back. Combined, all of these forces are rending at the fabric of security and stable governance that all states aspire to and rely on for survival.”
This is a war, then, between US-led capitalist globalization, and anyone who resists it.
And
to win it, the document puts forward a combination of strategies:
consolidating the U.S. intelligence complex and using it more
ruthlessly; intensifying mass surveillance and propaganda to manipulate
popular opinion; expanding U.S. military clout to ensure access to
“strategic regions, markets, and resources”.
Even so, the overarching goal is somewhat more modest — to prevent the U.S.-led order from collapsing further:
“…. while the favorable U.S.-dominated status quo is under significant internal and external pressure, adapted American power can help to forestall or even reverse outright failure in the most critical regions”.
The
hope is that the U.S. will be able to fashion “a remodeled but
nonetheless still favorable post-primacy international order.”
Narcissism
Like
all U.S. Army War College publications, the document states that it
does not necessarily represent the official position of the U.S. Army or
DoD. While this caveat means that its findings cannot be taken to
formally represent the U.S. government, the document does also admit
that it represents “the collective wisdom” of the numerous officials
consulted.
In
that sense, the document is a uniquely insightful window into the mind
of the Pentagon, and how embarrassingly limited its cognitive scope
really is.
And
this in turn reveals not only why the Pentagon’s approach is bound to
make things worse, but also what an alternative more productive approach
might look like.
Launched
in June 2016 and completed in April 2017, the U.S. Army War College
research project involved extensive consultation with officials across
the Pentagon, including representatives of the joint and service staffs,
the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), U.S. Central Command
(USCENTCOM), U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), U.S. Northern Command
(USNORTHCOM), U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM); U.S. Forces,
Japan (USFJ), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National
Intelligence Council, U.S. Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), and U.S. Army
Pacific [USARPAC] and Pacific Fleet [PACFLT]).
The
study team also consulted with a handful of American think-tanks of a
somewhat neoconservative persuasion: the American Enterprise Institute,
the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the RAND
Corporation, and the Institute for the Study of War.
No wonder, then, that its findings are so myopic.
But
what else would you expect from a research process so deeply
narcissistic, that it involves little more than talking to yourself? Is
it any wonder that the solutions offered represent an echo chamber
calling to amplify precisely the same policies that have contributed to
the destabilization of U.S. power?
The
research methodology manages to systematically ignore the most critical
evidence surrounding the drivers undermining U.S. primacy: such as, the
biophysical processes of climate, energy and food disruption behind the Arab Spring; the confluence of military violence, fossil fuel interests and geopolitical alliances
behind the rise of ISIS; or the fundamental grievances that have driven
a breakdown in trust with governments since the 2008 financial collapse
and the ensuing ongoing period of neoliberal economic failure.
A
large body of data demonstrates that the escalating risks to U.S. power
have come not from outside U.S. power, but from the very manner in
which U.S. power has operated. The breakdown of the U.S.-led
international order, from this perspective, is happening as a direct
consequence of deep-seated flaws in the structure, values and vision of
that order.
In
this context, the study’s conclusions are less a reflection of the
actual state of the world, than of the way the Pentagon sees itself and
the world.
Indeed,
most telling of all is the document’s utter inability to recognize the
role of the Pentagon itself in systematically pursuing a wide range of
policies over the last several decades which have contributed directly
to the very instability it now wants to defend against.
The
Pentagon frames itself as existing outside the Hobbesian turmoil that
it conveniently projects onto the world — the result is a monumental and
convenient rejection of any sense of responsibility for what happens in
the world.
In
this sense, the document is a powerful illustration of the
self-limiting failure of conventional risk-assessment approaches. What
is needed instead is a systems-oriented approach based on evaluating not
just the Pentagon’s internal beliefs about the drivers of risk — but
engaging with independent scientific evidence about those drivers to
test the extent to which those beliefs withstand rigorous scrutiny.
Such
an approach could open the door to a very different scenario to the one
recommended by this document — one based on a willingness to actually
look in the mirror. And that in turn might open up the opportunity for
Pentagon officials to imagine alternative policies with a real chance of
actually working, rather than reinforcing the same stale failed
strategies of the past.
It
is no surprise then that even the Pentagon’s apparent conviction in the
inexorable decline of U.S. power could well be overblown.
According
to Dr Sean Starrs of MIT’s Center for International Studies, a true
picture of U.S. power cannot be determined solely from national
accounts. We have to look at the accounts of transnational corporations.
Starrs shows
that American transnational corporations are vastly more powerful than
their competitors. His data suggests that American economic supremacism
remains at an all-time high, and still unchallenged even by an economic
powerhouse like China.
This
does not necessarily discredit the Pentagon’s emerging recognition that
U.S. imperial power faces a new era of decline and unprecedented
volatility.
But
it does suggest that the Pentagon’s sense of U.S. global pre-eminence
is very much bound up with its capacity to project American capitalism
globally.
As
geopolitical rivals agitate against U.S. economic reach, and as new
movements emerge hoping to undermine American “unimpeded access” to
global resources and markets, what’s clear is that DoD officials see
anything which competes with or undermines American capitalism as a
clear and present danger.
But nothing put forward in this document will actually contribute to slowing the decline of U.S. power.
On
the contrary, the Pentagon study’s recommendations call for an
intensification of the very imperial policies that futurist Professor
Johan Galtung, who accurately forecasted the demise of the USSR, predicts will accelerate the “collapse of the U.S. empire” by around 2020.
As
we move deeper into the “post-primacy” era, the more meaningful
question for people, governments, civil society and industry is this: as
the empire falls, lashing out in its death throes, what comes after?
This
INSURGE story was enabled by crowdfunding: Please support independent
journalism for the global commons for as little as a $1/month via www.patreon.com/nafeez
Dr.
Nafeez Ahmed is an award-winning 16-year investigative journalist and
creator of INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded public interest
investigative journalism project. He is ‘System Shift’ columnist at
VICE’s Motherboard.
His
work has been published in The Guardian, VICE, Independent on Sunday,
The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign
Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer, The New Statesman,
Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, Raw Story, New Internationalist,
Huffington Post UK, Al-Arabiya English, AlterNet, The Ecologist, and
Asia Times, among other places.
Nafeez has twice been featured in the Evening Standard’s ‘Top 1,000’ list of most influential people in London.
His latest book, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence
(Springer, 2017) is a scientific study of how climate, energy, food and
economic crises are driving state failures around the world.
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